


Requiescat in pace et ultra

by OasisTrap



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Assassins & Hitmen, Drabble Collection, F/M, Gen, Physics, Post-Reichenbach, Smoking
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-12-14
Updated: 2014-04-18
Packaged: 2018-01-04 15:09:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1082489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OasisTrap/pseuds/OasisTrap
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This is a collection of drabbles and prompt responses from my tumblr.</p><p>You can always throw me one at http://oasistrap.tumblr.com/</p>
    </blockquote>





	1. Into the Night #0

**Author's Note:**

> This is a collection of drabbles and prompt responses from my tumblr.
> 
> You can always throw me one at http://oasistrap.tumblr.com/

_O you whom I often and silently come where you are,_

_That I may be with you;_

_As I walk by your side, or sit near, or remain in the_

_Same room with you,_

_Little you know the subtle electric fire that for your_

_Sake is playing within me._

**Walt Whitman**

* * *

 

Her presence was no more than a ghastly form on the corner of his eye. The feeling of her from his bodily memory created a metaphysical avatar that filled a space in the empty room. Her imaginary heat, her nonexistent heartbeat, her passing breath, her feather-light skin—but how could his mind tricked him this way? Was he not heartless, the cold machine with staggering indifference toward everything humane?

She certainly had a heart—he proved it himself when he rested his fingertips on her wrist and mentally recorded every beat, translated them into electronic sounds and graphic of inclining lines in his head—and it never occurred to him that she might have one before that night. She had been the trickiest puzzle, the biggest question in his life. Her mind was a powerful weapon, but, for some reason, much more unique and enchanting in a woman’s body.

And yet, physical attraction was beyond him as he watched every drop of tear or tremble of eyelids or expression of pain on her face. He wondered how many smiles of hers were faked and how many of them were genuine. He wondered how many gestures of seduction were effortless and how many signs of attraction were repressed.

There was something else, he had her all figured out, but it was not enough.

Something was tearing him from the inside, telling him that if he didn’t do it now, he wouldn’t get a second chance. Something was guiding his steps into the night, away from the warmth of his London flat to the cold desert in the middle of nowhere. Something was driving him into action, when the world slowed down and he raised his sword…

Perhaps it was the fire in her glistening eyes when he met her unwavering stare.


	2. Coping Mechanism #1

Suicide of a Fake Genius. _How ridiculous._

The palpable numbness she felt on her fingertips says it all.

She bought a pack of cigarettes and took the long way round back to her apartment. It’s been many years since the last time she smoked. _Marlboro, the usual._ Now that she thought about it, it was a lifetime away. Before Belgravia and the political games she delightfully indulged herself in, her past life was far from royalty scandals and government secrets. It was unchallenging, dull, _normal_ , many other things that Irene Adler was not. She tried to remember why she decided to turn away from it and began her life as The Dominatrix. _To take control?_

Afterlife was getting very nostalgic thanks to the death of a certain consulting detective.

After a cold dinner and half a dozen cigarettes past midnight ( _the buzz of nicotine through her bloodstream anchored her to reality_ ), she closed the windows. For some reason she didn’t bother to lock them. She also didn’t bother to turn the lights off before she slipped onto the bed and tried to sleep. Every time she closed her eyes, a pair of iridescent blue orbs under a mop of black curls found her.

How could she look away when he was hiding behind her lids?

_Another fag and he would go away_ , she tried to convince herself.

 

* * *

 

One whole month with nothing worth noting passed in the afterlife.

She burned her first false passport ( _the souvenir from Islamabad_ ) after acquiring a new one and made travel plans. A flight to San Francisco, or Dallas, or Johannesburg, or Sidney. Or maybe even Paris, she had missed Europe ( _he blacklisted every city in Europe for her when he gave her the souvenir and a Geneva bank account, they argued about it to no avail_ ).

She spent a whole week scheming,–escape route, exit strategy, listing the best restaurants in the city she planned to go—but she ended up abandoning them.

She stayed, smoked two packs of cigarette every day, neglecting to lock the windows and turning off the lights, and gave in to restless sleep every night.

 

* * *

 

One night, she felt a foreign weight on the edge of the bed.

Sherlock Holmes—with shorter hair and one sleepless week, obviously—bent down to take off his socks and shoes. He looked like a cold marble statue; too pale for a man, too hard for a two-months-old corpse.

She opened one eye lazily to assess him and tried to ignore her elevated heartbeat.

He slipped between the covers and reached for her wrist like it was the normal thing for him to do.

When his lips touched hers, she purposely kept her eyes open and found that he did the same.

 

* * *

 

“Where do you keep the fags?”

“Smoked the last one today, I’m quitting.”

“Why?”

“I just decided to.”

“Were you waiting for me?”

“Yes. Took you long enough.”

“Thank god I got here before the cancer.”

“You cheeky sod.”


	3. Why the Cat Survived #2

Death was a harsh mistress indeed.

Twenty-one months, sixteen days, eight hours, thirty-five seconds, five broken ribs (now almost fully healed), two gunshot wounds courtesy of two different mercenaries (left shoulder for her, right arm for him), and approximately two occasions where they swore they could slit each other’s throat out of sheer frustration.

 

The first was when he showed up on her doorstep after three days without any contact whatsoever. She almost slammed the door on his idiotic face (bruised cheek, one black eye), fully intended to break his nose this time (they _always_ missed his nose). They fought with bitter words and cold remarks mirroring the intensity of the snowstorm outside. He practically dismissed every fallback procedure they had agreed to use in case of emergency and (even though she would never admit it out loud) left her worried sick for three excruciating days. At first, he refused to tell her why. She knew, of course, it was a part of a revenge plot he had devised before their partnership ( _one for John, Lestrade, and Mrs. Hudson_ ). Their fight ended with a long silence and a rare apology from him in the break of dawn. It was the moment they realised they couldn’t turn away from each other for the sake of what sanity left in them.

 

The second was a prelude to something much more complicated involving the nature of their partnership. They had finished the last thing they needed to do to bring down Moriarty’s Web. It involved breaking into three separate banks and hacking their system to cut all funding directed to three different vigilante acts, effectively terminating their contracts with the Web. Even Irene had to admit she never had so much fun before, slipping through priority-one securities with her natural seductive charm and enjoying the disapproval in Sherlock’s face when she did it.

That night, they finally had a proper dinner to celebrate. With candlelight and roses in a five-star restaurant. Of course, halfway through the main course Sherlock had to slip an inconspicuous blackmail material into a rich tycoon’s pocket and whispered some things that made his face whitened with horror, but overall she still counted it as a date. When desert arrived, he told her with the casual air of commenting the weather that he already booked a flight to London for tomorrow. She scowled at him with anger and went back to their hotel room. He didn’t dare to say a word to stop her.

 

“Are you angry?” He asked her one hour later back at their suite.

“No. Not anymore.” Her eyes were empty.

Silence. “I have to go back.” He wondered whether she could hear him beg for the first time with those five words.

“Eventually.” she quietly said. “It’s a shame; we were so good at being dead.” She wondered whether he was actually this terrible with goodbyes. After all, he did fall from a rooftop to say it the last time.

“Yes.” He grimaced at his own inexplicable awkwardness. Nevertheless, this could be the last chance for him (them?) to say the unsaid. They would never be together again as two ghosts. By daylight, Sherlock Holmes would walk the earth again. Irene Adler, however, would stay underground.

 

Every bit of everything that happened to them was their own brilliance’s fault. There shouldn’t be any regret between them.

So he reached for her. _Closer._ He wanted to breathe her in, watch her pupils bled with alarming velocity, relish every single heartbeat, his and hers.

In his embrace, she never felt so alive.

 

“Back in Karachi, there were two possible outcomes. Either you live or die. Naturally, the universe would split to accommodate each of them.” _Breathe_. “It wasn’t in favour for the first possibility, and I found it inconvenient.” He stammered, realising that he just said something else other than what he really meant. “I-I understand you know why I had to involve myself as a factor that would affect the outcome.”

“Sherlock Holmes,” She buried her smile on his shoulder. “Did you just compare me to a quantum particle?”

“Maybe. So many layers of mystery,” He grazed her cheek with his lips. “I couldn’t bear to think I would lose them. Lose you, all of you. Not seeing you again and knowing there is so much more than _you_.”

“I’ll consider it as a compliment.” She turned to meet his ghastly touch. “Thought experiments are very unrewarding.”

“In this case, yes..” An urgent kiss from her silenced him. He felt his body buzzing with excitement and fervor. When they parted, he knew he had found a new, thoroughly gratifying addiction.

Breathless, she whispered. “Back in London, my heart betrayed me. And I wouldn’t want it to happen any other way.”

He smiled and decided they had enough words to say.


	4. Dreams and Daydreams #3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For hoho-jaeger at tumblr who asked for a small fluff after Karachi  
> (I still have no idea how to write fluff but I guess this counts)

“Don’t you ever sleep?”

 

Irene said in a tired voice after she woke up to an empty space on the bed beside her. She had struggled a bit when she tried to move because a blanket was tightly wrapped around her like a cocoon even though she didn’t even remember fallen asleep with it. She smiled slightly when she recalled the last thing she remembered before falling asleep; his arms around her, the rise and fall of his chest under her cheek, and him whispering the atomic weight of all the elements on Mendeleev’s periodic table in her ear (she had told him she couldn’t possibly close her eyes after what happened that night and he accepted the challenge by trying to bore her to sleep).

 

Sherlock was leaning on the windowsill with a cigarette in hand, wind from the slightly opened window blowing his curls, and he was wearing nothing but his underpants. He turned to her with raised eyebrows and another drag of his cigarette. “I don’t need sleep.” He turned again to the window, exhaling.

 

“Still trying to come to terms with your loss of virginity?” She purred, sliding out of the blanket and lying on her stomach, resting her head on her folded arms.

 

“Hardly.” He drawled, pitching down the tone of his voice to a rumbling baritone he knew she liked. He had learned a few things about what she liked during the course of the night, and he felt rather smug when she responded accordingly to his prediction. Like now, for instance, when he saw her smile growing and her eyelids narrowed. He was also quite sure she bit the inside of her bottom lip in an attempt to resist licking it.

 

Irene chuckled. “You want to go for another round? I did promise you I will make you beg, _twice_.” She lifted her body slightly, purposely showing him the clear sight of her breasts. His eyes darted quickly to assess her appearance and she saw him shiver slightly.

 

Sherlock swallowed and cleared his throat. “Why are you awake?”

 

Her expression changed. “I told you it won’t be likely for me to sleep peacefully in the coming months.” She sighed and turned to lie on her back, watching the dark ceiling of their hotel room. “The things I saw in there…there’s no way I can forget them soon. So, naturally, I have nightmares.”

 

He considered it for a moment. Dreaming was quite unusual for him because of his sporadic sleeping pattern. When he slept, it was only due to extreme fatigue and they ended up being more like a coma. Except, of course, that one time… “I don’t usually dream,” he pondered, flicking the cigarette stub out of the window. “The last time was when you were in my room.”

 

She lifted her head to look at him, confused. But then she grinned and laughed in amusement. “Really? You dreamed about me?”

 

He fidgeted uncharacteristically. “Well, you drugged me with some kind of a hallucinogen and then broke into my room…the effect of the drug hadn’t wear off at that time.”

 

“Of course, it was one of the few ways to make you stop talking other than straddling you naked. And I really had to try my own theory about the hiker without you and your cheekbones stalking around the room. I was right, wasn’t I?”

“Yes, but you took too long to put all the clues together, Miss Adler.”

 

“Oh we can always do another one next time, Mister Holmes. I’m afraid you’ve spoiled all the conventional detective stories for me, anyway.”

 

Sherlock smiled and approached her on the bed, hanging his head above hers. “I look forward to it.”

She pulled him down for a kiss and he complied.


	5. Conflicted Schedules #4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When a certain dominatrix encountered an unnamed assassin.

“There’s nothing in the tea.”

Irene flicked through the client’s luxurious, leather-bounded journal slowly page by page while observing her illustrious guest in her peripheral vision. Dressed in black from head to toe, it was apparently the actual standard work outfit for assassins these days. She sat stiffly with the Beretta M9 on her lap, complete with a silencer attached and, Irene was quite sure, enough bullets to kill everyone in this house. She also hadn’t touched the cup of rapidly cooling tea on the table. Kate had served it for them ten minutes ago, baffled by the uninvited guest who managed to sneak up unseen through the balcony. Irene had told her assistant that everything is under control and she can certainly handle the situation, it was a bit of an inconvenient scheduling conflict between them, that’s all.

Now she could see her glancing impatiently at the bedroom door. Irene pursed her lips in annoyance. She wasn’t the only one who needs to finish her job, the least she could do right now was to help her go through their respective client/target journal and find a suitable time to rearrange his death. Preferably not today because Irene Adler had maintained a considerable reputation and having a dead client on her watch would be bad for business.

“Don’t worry, he won’t be going anywhere for the next few hours.” She sighed while trailing a series of handwritten sidenotes on a particular page in the journal with her stark, red-painted fingernail. “How about Friday? You can poison him at the Prime Minister’s birthday dinner. Stage it as a heart attack, less messy, more media exposure…”

“Sorry,” the assassin grimaced. “My employer wants him dead by Thursday.”

“Your employer being his wife?” Irene rolled her eyes, briefly noticing the slight American accent in her guest’s speech.

She raised her eyebrows. “Oh, you’re good. Yes, the wife wants him dead by Thursday so that she won’t need to come to that party. Also, the security’s going to be quite tricky and I really don’t want to go that far to kill a man like him.”

“Fine…” Irene smoothed the crease between her eyebrows in irritation. “And you can’t kill him while he’s working. Let’s see…he have to visit a children hospital tomorrow, how about that? I’m sure you won’t mind traumatising a few poor young souls by murdering him in front of them. Maybe they’d even be relieved. The man’s an insufferable bastard.”

“Kill him in a hospital filled with children. That’s risky.”

“You love risky, that’s why you’re here even though you had absolutely no idea what kind of place is this.” Until about twenty minutes ago when their respective client/target got rather excited and started making indecent noises from the bedroom, interrupting the civilized conversation she was trying to initiate with the woman aiming a pistol at her forehead.

The guest opened and closed her mouth a couple times, baffled. “You’re absolutely right. It’s good enough for me, I’ll take it.” She put the safety back on in her gun and unscrewed the silencer. “Good luck with him,” She whispered. “He looks like the kind that’s going to have a long time coming.”

Irene smirked and propped her jaw on her hand smugly. “Thank god I’m a professional, then.”

She smiled and winked at her before standing up to leave. “Oh, trust me, I know. Sorry about your window, though.”

“It’s okay, thank you for testing the new lock.” Irene waved her hand and hesitated for a second. “By the way, can I have your number?”

She laughed. “What for, in case you want to ‘dispose’ one of your clients?”

“Well, yes...” Irene continued in her best seductive tone. “And if you like, we can have dinner sometimes.”

“Dinner, as in…oh. Oh! Sorry, I’m not used to someone asking me for a date when I’m at work. But so sorry, I don’t...you know…”

“Ah, I understand. If you changed your mind, you can find my number on my website.” Irene winked at her, but she just grinned amusedly and schooled herself to a neutral expression.

“I’ll remember that. You still want my number? I just went freelance and I can always make time for potential employers.”

“Yes, certainly.” Irene reached for her new phone in her pocket.

“Nice cameraphone.”

“I know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Unbeta-ed and unbritpicked. Don't shoot!


End file.
